Thursday, July 24, 2008

Buying a new car...

So, after months of research, test driving, more research, we have the new car parked in the garage.

It's been an interesting process. Not only do we seem to know more about the particular car we got than any of the car dealers we met. They seem totally lost when it comes to internet and communicating in other ways than live on the lot. We got automated e-mails from huge car dealers using aol.com or hotmail.com addresses...They also really seem to think that they can try to offer prices way higher than the sticker prices they even have on their own inventory pages online... Why would you pay a price higher than sticker price?? One dealer offered a price $8000 higher than invoice and almost $4000 higher than sticker price, when we could just print the sticker with the price of the actual car from their website.... amazing... Don't they even know what they show online??

All in all - if you do your research online, make sure you know the invoice prices of the car you want, the exact "packages" and their specific value, study the sticker information of each car close - you really can get a good deal. We never negotiated on site - just by e-mail and phone after asking for a quote online on a very specific car to a very specific price. Once we got to the dealer - we were there only to sign papers.

We actually ended up buying the car that the dealer first priced at $8000 higher.... but then it took him 3 minutes to call back with a price at invoice level when we said we had an offer from another dealer for a totally different price... In the end we got a price lower than what we had said was our upper limit and we know from all research we did that we did a good deal.

Phew.

Now I'm done with going through the process of buying a car for another ten years or so. And this blog will hopefully not mention the word car for a very long time...

Chrysler Town&Country in "Clearwater Pearl Blue" - don't you just love the namesof the color they invent... "light blue" could also be a description... (from Chrysler.com)

Me in the car outside the dealer (oh, I'm in there, behind the wheel, trying to take off...),ready to drive the car home! (from the Husband's Blackberry...)

Yeah we might just do that! Husbands always said that if we HAVE to have a people carrier then a T&C would be his preferred choice.(Btw,we are hiring an RV this week for a few days as we have always said we think it sounds kinda fun!)

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This is where I grew up. 8506 km from California. Europe's fourth largest country in size, but tiny in population. Only 9 million of us. Meeting a Swede should probably be considered being unique! A part of my heart will always be here.